Science Fiction Writing

I email my manuscript to myself for portability, and when I opened the latest iteration, the one that should have 30,314 words, it reported 27,000 words. Excuse me?

I scroll through and notice that there’s entire paragraphs where the spaces were stripped out. Not sure how that happened, but it’s pretty annoying. I don’t think I made any changes to the majority of the text, just the beginning and the end, and since that text was undamaged, it imported it into this morning’s copy and all is well.

I’m wondering how the spaces got stripped out, though. While I could restore the spaces by hand, I’m not going to spend my time putting 3300 spaces in the correct spots. Backup copy to the rescue.

Anyone else ever have huge formatting disasters? Usually Word and me, we’re friends, but this time, I don’t know what happened. Stabbed me in the back, it did.